Zen koan: Kosen, a master calligrapher, had a pupil who never failed to criticize his master’s work.

“This is not good,” the pupil told Kosen after a first effort.

The master tried again and asked, “How is this one?”

“Poor, worse than before,” pronounced the pupil.

Kosen patiently filled one sheet after another until 84 attempts had accumulated without the approval of the pupil.

When the young man stepped outside for a few moments, Kosen thought: “Now this is my chance to escape his keen eye,” and he wrote hurriedly, with a mind free from distraction.

“A masterpiece,” said the pupil.

Local artist Chad Brown, inspired by the teachings of Zen Buddhism and a sense that we’ve entered a new era of responsibility, had the somewhat loopy idea to make a triangular white flag that would symbolize peace through perseverance. This unprepossessing object, titled “Compassionate Resolve,” is the centerpiece of Your Move, and inspired the other works—three oil paintings and a sumi-ink drawing—on display at the Winchester Cultural Center.

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Chad Brown's Your Move

Through April 17

Tuesday-Friday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m., Saturday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-7 p.m.; free.

Winchester Cultural Center Gallery, 455-7340.

To fabricate the flag, Brown had to teach himself to use a sewing machine, and then, because it was composed of 14 layers of cotton and silk, he had to sew some parts by hand.

The flag is the focal point of a series of paintings depicting a man flourishing the standard through Las Vegas’ streets. From the exuberant strokes and squiggles, one likely could not guess as to the effort that went into the paintings. Brown built his own wooden supports (meticulously beveling the edges to which the canvas is tautly stretched), applied multiple layers of self-concocted marble-dust gesso and sanded each layer to a glass-like smoothness. He began painting with thin washes of transparent color and spritzes of turpentine. Subsequent layers were “erased” repeatedly. The results seem spontaneous, but that’s an illusion.

Brown, like Kosen, is a master; but he is also like the pupil, egging himself on for a masterpiece to emerge. One did, after he’d completed the flag and his exhortatory paintings, in the form of a 30-foot sumi-ink “drawing” of the Las Vegas Valley made specifically for the curved wall of the Winchester space. It was painted last—Las Vegas without the neon. The lustrous black-on-black forms come closest to illustrating the Zen-like sense that “everything is nothing, and nothing is all.”